


of the sun and other stars (and the many plants in his garden)

by dayflies



Series: everybody's changing and i don't feel the same [2]
Category: TOMORROW X TOGETHER | TXT (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Childhood Friends, Gen, Huening Kai-Centric, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Choi Soobin/Choi Yeonjun, Platonic Relationships, read it however you want to though, tyunning are childhood friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:00:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25922467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dayflies/pseuds/dayflies
Summary: Because nothing tears Kai up quite as much as seeing others being upset, especially when it’s his mother, or father, or sisters, or Soobin, or Yeonjun, or Beomgyu or Taehyun. When they are sad, it’s as if he gets sad too.So in the end he doesn’t really mind being known as the sunshine kid. If Kai is a sun, they are his earth. He gives them their light and their days. He makes their flowers bloom every morning. He dries tears the same way morning dew on grass evaporates. He hands out warm, tight hugs like how the sun warms up the surface of the earth.Keeping people happy is what he excels at. He knows what each and everyone of his friends need when they are down, he is fluent in it.(in which Yeonjun leaves for college, leaving behind a very distraught Huening Kai.)
Relationships: Choi Yeonjun & Huening Kai, Huening Kai & Kang Taehyun
Series: everybody's changing and i don't feel the same [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1882384
Comments: 12
Kudos: 62





	of the sun and other stars (and the many plants in his garden)

**Author's Note:**

> hello!  
> this takes place after my yeonbin fic, which you can find [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24001924), although you don't need to have read this to understand what happens in this one. there are references to it in this fic though that might throw u off a little bit, and i would of course be very happy if you gave that one a shot too!
> 
> general disclaimer that this is all fictional! i, of course, know nothing about the boys or their families. i mention a childhood bully in here, and he does not correlate to any idol or person for that matter, in real life, i named him completely randomly. with all that being said, i hope you enjoy!

If you were to ask any of Huening Kai’s classmates about him, you would most likely receive the same answer: “Kai is like, the brightest person ever.” (or well, the answers would obviously vary a little bit as answers from different people tend to do, but the general idea is the same).

If you were to ask _Kai_ he’d also say he’s a pretty easygoing guy. An optimistic “the glass is half-full” type of person, a “the glass is half full to make room for fruit syrup and ice cubes” type of person, even.

Exhibit one: he isn’t a picky eater (at least in comparison to Beomgyu). He has the multiple food trips to convenience stores and fast food restaurants with Taehyun at questionable times during the night to show for that.

Exhibit two: he doesn’t even get annoyed when Soobin forces him and the others to re-watch The Perks of Being a Wallflower for the umpteenth time (although he does pretend he is, sometimes). On the contrary, he thinks it’s pretty fun to gather around the television with his hyungs and two big bowls of popcorn, even if they’ve watched it together so many times that Beomgyu is able to recite a chunk of the final monologue in his sleep.

Exhibit three: he is friendly and likes practically everyone. He gets along with almost every person he knows, and there aren’t many people he dislikes, and not a single person he outright hates. He searches for the positives in everyone, even if he has to use a magnifying glass - his 2nd grade schoolyard bully, who had attempted to flush one of Kai’s plushies down the toilet is an example of this (the incident had traumatized young Kai deeply, and he’d stopped bringing plushies along with him to school for a good two months).

☀️

Fast forward from the toilet incident with give or take ten years, Kai is standing on the sidewalk with Soobin, Taehyun, Beomgyu and Yeonjun’s mother watching Yeonjun and his father load up the car with boxes. In the boxes are the last things Yeonjun will bring with him to college.

It’s an uncomfortably hot summer day in June, Yeonjun is moving, and Kai thinks he will remember this day for the rest of his life. 

The last box is propped in, (Kai knows what’s in this one, because Yeonjun has written CLOTHES + NING FLOWER on it with big, squiggly letters and a little doodle of a smiling flower), and Yeonjun’s father slams the lid of the trunk shut with ominous finality. 

Kai can feel his eyes starting to sting, so he turns his face up, stares at a spot right next to the glaring sun, blinking rapidly. He takes a few deep breaths, closes his eyes, focuses on the bright blue and pink spots behind his eyelids, opens his eyes again, and sprints towards Yeonjun with the loudest shriek he’s ever let out in his life, tackling him in a big embrace that is appropriately life threatening. Yeonjun yelps in surprise, but laughs delightedly, wrapping his long arms around Kai.

“Bye-bye” Kai singsongs, patting Yeonjun’s hair which is hot from the sun. It comes out more like a “bai-bai”. “Take good care of my sunflower.”

“You mean _my_ flower, it’s mine now.”

“I’m still it’s original plant father!”

The Ning Flower.

He’d meant to gift Yeonjun a sunflower plant for his new dorm as a little inside joke - a sunflower from the sunshine boy, but frankly, Kai did not have a green thumb and hadn’t been able to make it sprout, so he’d opted for a giant sunflower plushie he’d found online. When he’d told Yeonjun about his failed plant experiment, Yeonjun had ruffled his hair and told him he appreciated the sentiment. He’d also made a joke about how odd it was that the flower couldn’t sprout when Kai was the one growing it (because, you know, sunshine kid and all).

🌻

After everyone has said their goodbyes with long, tight hugs and Yeonjun has made about fifty promises of visiting every weekend, when his departure can’t possibly be drawn out any longer because Yeonjun’s father is beginning to throw in offhand comments about traffic and how they were supposed to leave an hour ago, Yeonjun and his father finally get into the car.

“Bye! I’ll steal your videogames!” Beomgyu says, waving. Kai bounces a little bit on his heels. Soobin glances at him.

“Don’t run after the car,” he says with mild exasperation. ( _“You better leave my videogames alone!_ )

“I’m running after the car.” Kai retorts.

( _“They’re mine now, all mine,”_ )

“Why.” Taehyun says, and it doesn’t even sound like a question, just a dry statement. “It’s too hot and then you’ll complain about being gross and sweaty.”

The car roars to life, and starts rolling down the street.

And Kai runs after the car.

He drags a very disgruntled Soobin with him.

“I knew you’d make me come with you,” he mumbles, jogging next to Kai.

“Goodbye! I’ll never forget you!” Kai screams, ignoring Soobin. Yeonjun rolls down the window, waving a white tissue.

“Goodbye, my love! Take care of the children!” he hollers, and Kai lets out a loud bark of laughter. He isn’t looking at Soobin, but he’s sure he’s rolling his eyes in that fond way of his. 

The car speeds up, and soon Kai has to actually run to keep up with it. Soobin starts slowing down and stops soon after, fanning himself with his shirt, but Kai keeps going, keeps running faster and faster to keep up, although he’s falling behind. 

It’s not funny anymore, he realizes. It was never really that funny to begin with. 

Yeonjun watches with big eyes, hands tightly gripping the window sill of the car as the gap between him and Kai becomes wider and wider. A weird desperation takes root in Kai, a tiny seed at first, then a sapling, and it grows and grows, like those timelapses of sprouting plants his biology teacher showed him in class the other day. The car is getting away from him, vines are spreading like a poison and wrapping around his arms and legs. 

He can’t keep up. 

He isn’t getting anywhere at all. 

Yeonjun drops the white pretend-handkerchief with a startled yelp and it flies out of the window, and the car turns right and it’s gone. Kai comes to a halt in front of Yeonjun’s pretend-handkerchief, chest rising and falling, a tiny bead of sweat rolling down the side of his forehead. He stares at it for a few beats, before crouching down to pick it up. 

☀️

“ _Kai is like, the brightest person ever._ ”

Kai thinks about this a lot. Because despite being known as The Sunshine Boy by practically everyone in his life, there are things that upset him. Obviously. He is a human being after all. Kai isn’t much of a list person but if he, hypothetically, were to make a list of such things, he imagines tangled earbudwires and the way his room gets too hot in the summer would be in the bottom of the list, classified under mild, but very irritating inconveniences. 

His childhood bully would be somewhere in the middle, because Kai simply cannot forgive Woojin for attempting to flush his plushie down the toilet, even if he seems a lot nicer now.

And the very top of the list would be home to Taehyun’s face when Woojin stole his lunch in middle school. 

Or Yeonjun’s frown when his parents’ friends ask him what he plans on studying in university and then proceed to criticize his choice when he answers that he will be majoring in dance.

Or anything of the sort, really. 

Because nothing tears Kai up quite as much as seeing others being upset, especially when it’s his mother, or father, or sisters, or Soobin, or Yeonjun, or Beomgyu or Taehyun. When they are sad, it’s as if _he_ gets sad too. 

So in the end he doesn’t really mind being known as the sunshine kid. If Kai is a sun, they are his earth. He gives them their light and their days. He makes their flowers bloom every morning. He dries tears the same way morning dew on grass evaporates. He hands out warm, tight hugs like how the sun warms up the surface of the earth. 

Keeping people happy is what he excels at. He knows what each and everyone of his friends need when they are down, he is fluent in it.

Kai thinks about this a lot. Maybe he thinks about it a bit more than he usually does in the weeks leading up to Yeonjun leaving for college.

🌻

Maybe that is why, when he hears Soobin’s approaching steps behind him, he turns around with a wide smile on his lips that make his cheeks hurt. Yeonjun’s pretend-handkerchief is crumpled up in his right hand.

“So how did you like our dramatic parting?” he asks cheekily.

“I think that might be the worst thing you two have ever done.” Soobin mumbles but his voice is fond. He throws an arm around Kai, then immediately seems to regret it because Taehyun is as always right. Kai is sweaty and gross. He seems to decide to keep his arm around Kai after a second's hesitation because Soobin is frankly kind of sweaty too, and they make their way back to Yeonjun’s driveway where Taehyun and Beomgyu are sitting on the sidewalk, waiting for them.

“Was that really necessary?” Taehyun asks exasperatedly once they’re within earshot.

“I thought you loved to exercise,” Kai shoots back at him. “Running after cars probably builds more stamina or whatever than running on a treadmill.”

“Not when you’re screaming about your hypothetical kids simultaneously,” Taehyun says, rolling his eyes as Beomgyu snickers.

“You could also just… not. Do any of the two, I mean.” Soobin adds, extending both hands to Beomgyu and Taehyun respectively, pulling them to their feet. Or rather, Taehyun grabs his hand and gets to his feet, while Beomgyu purposefully makes himself heavy, much to Soobin’s annoyance. He uses his free hand to grab Beomgyu’s other hand, and manages to drag Beomgyu up by a few centimeters. The other boy grins.

“Come on Soobin, pull! This is even more effective than exercise!” he cackles.

“Just let go of him,” Taehyun says matter-of-factly. “He won’t be so smug when his ass lands on the sidewalk.”

Beomgyu aims a kick at him (he misses), making Soobin lose his balance, and they both topple down on the asphalt.

☀️

Kai suggests they all hang out at his house and play videogames while they wait for an update from Yeonjun, and he eagerly chit chatters about how big and cool Yeonjun’s new school must be, and how nice it must be to live by yourself the entire walk back. He walks next to Soobin and gives the older boy a few more bellyrubs than he usually does. 

When Beomgyu asks him what he’s holding onto, Kai laughs and tells him he found it on the street and he’d picked it up “for the environment, y’know?” and that he’d throw it out as soon as they arrived at his house. Beomgyu snickers and ruffles his hair mumbling something about Kai being too good of a human being.

Kai tucks the pretend-handkerchief safely into the pocket of his jeans. 

There’s an empty spot next to Soobin. Kai does not look at it.

🌻

Kai, Taehyun, Beomgyu, Soobin and Yeonjun. 

That was the way things had been for years. Kai often found that his classmates would look at him and Taehyun with glistening admiration whenever Yeonjun, older than them by three years, would wave at them through the window of their classroom while passing by with his classmates, because _"how in the world had they managed to become friends with the older kids?"_

As with many good friendships, Kai isn’t sure where it had all started, when they went from being just acquaintances, to friends and then to his closest friends, when Kai and Taehyun and Beomgyu and Soobin and Yeonjun became Kai-Taehyun-Beomgyu-Soobin-Yeonjun. All he knows is that they came to be through a combination of friendship between their parents, living in close proximity to each other, joining the same clubs in school, and of course being classmates and joined at the hip since kindergarten in Kai and Taehyun’s case.

Like an old patchwork quilt, their lives had intertwined, had weaved in and out and over and under and in between one another. There had definitely been a starting point, a moment where they all had hung out together as five for the first time, that first patch that lay the groundwork, but when looking at the entire quilt, it was impossible to tell where the beginning was.

Kai had always felt kind of cool when he hung around Soobin, Beomgyu and Yeonjun at school. 

The older, popular kids and Taehyun and him.

But sometimes Kai feels a bit small in comparison, figuratively and literally. 

Like when he’s hanging out with Yeonjun and one of his friends asks if “the kid” is his baby brother in that kind of condescending way. As if he is a burden they don’t want around (Yeonjun always puts his arm around Kai with a good natured “Nah, he’s my friend, Kai! He’s cool,”). Even Taehyun, who is only half a year apart from him in age doesn’t get mistaken as Yeonjun’s annoying kid brother as often as he does. He figures it can’t really be helped when you look a lot younger and scrawnier than the people you surround yourself with.

But although Kai is the youngest, smallest and probably the most naive out of the five, he isn’t _lost_ or anything. He isn’t _stupid_ the way he knows Yeonjun's other friends think he is. He sees a lot more than you would think.

Exhibit one: When Taehyun hugged Yeonjun goodbye, Kai had seen how his grip tightened around him, even as he’d said they were being way too dramatic for someone who’s only moving an hour away (which isn’t true. It’s one hour and a half, and that’s on days when the traffic is being generous).

Exhibit two: When they’d been standing by the car, he’d heard Beomgyu’s voice wobble just the tiniest bit, while shouting out that he’d steal the videogames Yeonjun left behind. 

Exhibit three: During the entire week leading up to Yeonjun going away, Soobin had been unusually quiet. Not that Soobin is usually loud, but he is a constant presence. Soobin’s voice is a pleasant, reassuring hum underneath the loud bickering. His absence could be felt.

Exhibit four: There has been a little shift in their group, and Kai isn’t sure when it happened, but it’s there, and once he’d first noticed that something was off, he couldn’t seem to shake the feeling.

  


(“Don’t you guys think Yeonjun hyung and Soobin hyung are acting kinda weird?” he’d asked Taehyun and Beomgyu, while the three of them were sitting in Kai’s kitchen, throwing together a giant ice cream sundae with as many kinds of different topping they could find in the cupboards and the fridge.

Taehyun had frowned.

“I thought so too. It’s like they’re avoiding each other or something? They’re acting really strange.”

“What if they fought?”

Beomgyu had simply looked back and forth between Kai and Taehyun, then thrown his head back and cackled loudly. “Nah, they didn’t fight. But they really need to get their shit together.” he’d said, smiling mischievously, as if he knew a secret the others didn’t know. And that was all it took for Kai to realize.

“...Oh. Oh wow.” he’d said, eyes gliding from Beomgyu whose smug smile morphed into a wicked grin, to Taehyun whose big, round eyes widened in understanding.

_So that’s how it is._

“Pass me the chocolate sprinkles, Hyuka,” Beomgyu had said, and they’d left it at that.)

  


Kai thinks about the little details he picks up on a lot. And when he spots a tear in the patchwork quilt, he mends it, because keeping people happy is what he excels at.

☀️

Yeonjun facetimes them when he’s arrived at his dorm, chatting excitedly about his roommate who seems “really cool”. They’re still gathered in Kai’s room, with the window opened wide because his room tends to get too hot in the summer. The breeze makes the curtains rustle and the model of the solar system hanging above his desk swing softly from side to side.

Huening Kai keeps glancing at Soobin who is smiling at the tiny screen of his phone.

_So that’s how it is._

It makes sense. It explains the odd glances, the way Soobin and Yeonjun had seemed to dance awkwardly around each other the entire summer break, not quite touching each other, but never moving away from each other either, just orbiting, gravitating.

And Kai is worried. 

He thinks about Yeonjun who will be all alone in a big city for the first time in his life, but Yeonjun is Yeonjun, he is confident, extroverted, curious, unafraid and tough and he was made for the city life. He already gets along fine with his roommate.

( _they’ll probably be best friends after a week._ )

Mostly, he’s worried about Soobin, Soobin who feels everything too much, who gives his all away to others with no hesitation and who’s listening to Yeonjun talk about the big city with a patient smile that doesn’t quite seem to reach his eyes.

🌻

That night Soobin sleeps over at Kai’s house, and he hugs the older tightly as Soobin silently sniffles into his shoulder. And Kai does what he always does: he dries Soobin’s tears, and does his best to mend his wounds.

“He’ll visit every week, hyung, don’t worry,” he mutters. “He promised.”

Kai’s voice shakes a little at the last syllable.

The sun rejuvenates and heals, that is what it does. But it is also allconsuming and dangerous if you get too close. It can burn and burn and swallow you up whole if you aren’t careful.

So Kai does not let anything show. 

☀️

The trees slowly start shedding their leaves as late summer moves into autumn, and Yeonjun doesn’t come to visit as often as he’d initially promised, which doesn’t surprise anyone. Taking the bus every week is a hassle, and he’s often too busy with school work to go home, although he texts and calls a few times a week. 

They even watch The Perks of Being A Wallflower together. Yeonjun facetimes them from his phone, they take the call on Beomgyu’s IPad, and Soobin shares the screen of his laptop with Yeonjun on a discord channel so he can watch the film at the same time they do, and Soobin’s laptop is also booted up on the television through an HDMI-cable because his laptop screen is too small, and it’s all very confusing. It requires a stable internet connection too, which Yeonjun doesn’t have, so his screen keeps glitching. 

Needless to say, it isn’t quite the same. It isn’t even that fun; they have to keep exiting in and out of the discord channel, because nothing seems to be working right.

Kai curls up on the couch, hugging Tobin, his favourite plushy, close to his chest and does not look at the empty spot to the right of the couch where Yeonjun usually sits.

In the end Yeonjun has to go because Yeonjun’s roommate needs him for _something_ and Kai thinks this might be the first time they don’t make it through the entire movie. 

🌻

It has been a few weeks since the school year has started when Kai suddenly remembers the tissue paper.

He’s sitting cross legged on the floor folding laundry, the palms of his hands straightening down a stiff pair of jeans, and it hits him that it’s the exact pair he’d worn when Yeonjun left. He digs into the pocket with a little gasp. His hand comes up empty. He tries the other pocket. Then the back pockets. 

It’s not there, and he honestly did not expect it to be there. He has worn the jeans many times since, so he supposes the tissue had fallen out of his pocket at some point. He supposes it doesn’t actually matter. It’s just tissue paper.

He shrugs, folding the jeans and setting them aside by the little pile of his own neatly folded clothes. He picks up one of his father’s shirts, flattening it on the floor, bending the sleeves and gaze flickering back towards the light wash jeans to his left every so often.

_It’s just tissue paper._

He stares at the jeans for a few beats. Shaking his head slightly, he gets to his feet, leaving his father’s shirt on the floor. He walks into his room, opening the closet to check every pair of jeans he owns, because maybe those weren’t the jeans he’d worn, maybe he just remembered it wrong.

He digs into the closet, ripping out clothing article after clothing article, turning the pockets inside out and discarding every piece he’s checked on the floor.

“Where the hell is it?” he mumbles, throwing a pair of sweatpants over his shoulder, and the seed is sprouting again, branches growing and growing and growing, wrapping around his limbs, controlling his increasingly frantic movements as if he is a rag doll. He moves on to jackets, shoving his shaky hands into the pockets and coming up with candy wrappers and movie tickets (candy Yeonjun had shared with him after school, tickets for movies he has watched with Yeonjun), and he can’t _breathe_ , the branches are in his throat and around his chest and _everywhere_.

He can’t even see what he’s doing at this point, his vision blurring over with tears and he lets out a choked sob, desperately sifting through the heavy mass of tangled clothing in the very bottom of his closet. 

He thinks someone is talking to him, but the words won’t register. He can barely hear anything over his own ragged breathing as he untangles a sweatshirt and then one more and he keeps going and going and going and-

“Oh my god,”

Someone pries an old t-shirt gently from his fingers. He doesn’t fight against it. 

“Kai-ah, what’s wrong honey? What is it? _What is it?_ ”

Delicate but shaky hands wipe away his tears, like how they did when he was younger and had fallen and scraped his knee while playing tag with the neighborhood kids. They haven’t done that in years.

He takes a few shuddering breaths. Leaves are stuck in his throat.

“Yeonjun hyung, he-” he manages to choke out, before his voice cracks, and he curls in on himself. He wants to hide away, wants to be anywhere other than under his mother’s sad, sad eyes, but he’s rooted to the ground, and all he can do is sob and sob. 

“Oh, Kai-ah. My son, don’t cry.” she says, drawing him into an embrace, sounding like she’s on the verge of tears herself, which only serves to make him sob even more.

_My son._

He briefly looks up over his mother’s shoulder, taking in the mess he has created. There’s fabric everywhere. It’s going to take hours to clean up.

_My sun._

The sun has imploded in on itself, and it is destroying everything. It is burning everything. His mother’s cheeks are wet. 

The vines that are growing in him wilt and he feels more spent and worn out than he has ever been before. He doesn’t want to be here, or anywhere.

☀️

He’s supposed to meet with Taehyun and Soobin that evening so they can go to the arcade, but he calls Taehyun and tells them to go without him because he isn’t feeling well. It isn’t a lie afterall, because he really isn’t feeling that well. 

He tries his best to make himself sound ill, and he only feels a little guilty when Taehyun tells him to get well soon. 

He’s lying in bed watching his second episode of Haikyuu playing despite his eyes aching, when someone rings the doorbell. He hears his mother opening the door.

Really, he should have known Taehyun and Soobin would come, and Kai mostly just wants to tell them to leave him alone, but he doesn’t. Instead he closes down the lid of his laptop, checks whether his eyes still look swollen in the dark reflection from his black phone screen (they do, kind of, but he isn’t sure whether they really look swollen, or if he just thinks they do, like some sort of placebo effect). He sits up straighter and watches his bedroom door creak open.

Only Taehyun peeks inside.

“Hey,” he says, big and curious eyes fixing in on Kai. “I brought bingsu?” 

He sticks his arm through the opening, holding up a clear plastic bag with a cup of bingsu and a spoon. Kai lets out a little laugh that doesn’t sound entirely ungenuine and crosses his legs so there’s enough space for Taehyun to sit on the bed.

“Is bingsu really suitable for someone who’s sick?” he asks, watching Taehyun plop down on his bed across from him.

“It’s the best comfort food,” he says, handing him the container and a plastic spoon. 

“My mom would beg to differ,” Kai says, but still, he takes the container and pries off the lid. He isn’t actually ill so he supposes it doesn’t matter.

“Where’s Soobin hyung?”

“He went home,”

Kai remains quiet, so Taehyun continues. “We only hung out for a little bit.”

“Oh, that’s erm… you guys didn’t have to cut your time short because of me.” he mumbles, feeling guilty and a little sheepish. Taehyun shrugs.

“It wasn’t as fun without you anyways. Soobin kept bringing up how upset you must have been. He was already a bit bummed out because Beomgyu couldn’t come. Also, you were the one who asked us to go in the first place so it just felt kinda weird, I guess.”

Kai snorts. “So what, you just went in, played games for 10 minutes and left?”

“Pretty much, yeah. And we talked and stuff. Ate bingsu. It was nice.”

“I’m glad you had fun,” Kai says, and he means it. “It’s too cold for bingsu though.” he scoops up a big chunk of shaved ice and topping regardless and stuffs the spoon in his mouth. The dessert is cold and sweet and part of him wants to press the cold plastic cup to his eyes. 

Maybe that’ll help relieve the soreness.

“What did you guys talk about?” he says.

“Um. Just, stuff.” 

Kai has known Taehyun for long enough to recognize his different tells and habits and whatnot, and he can tell that this is Taehyun searching for the right words more than him trying to avert the question. He decides to help him out a little bit.

“You didn’t talk about me behind my back, did you?” he says lightheartedly, but his laugh dies when Taehyun doesn’t respond with the usual eye roll.

He regards Taehyun who just stares back at him with those wide, wide eyes of his that could swallow up the world. They’re searching his face, analyzing, in a way that would go unnoticed if he’d been sitting across from anyone other than Kai.

“Or maybe you did?” Kai asks hesitantly.

“Not in that way. Obviously. We didn’t talk shit about you or anything.” Taehyun says, and Kai thinks his gaze might be hovering around Kai’s eyes. If Kai was unsure about the state of his eyes before, he isn’t anymore. They are swollen, and Taehyun is looking right at them.

Kai regrets letting him inside in the first place.

“...You know." Kai concludes, frowning. He almost sounds a bit accusatory, so he pauses to mask his voice in carefully veiled detachment. "How did you find out? Did my mom tell you? Is that why you came?”

Taehyun blinks, looking a little perplexed.

“About what happened?” Kai continues, uneasiness creeping into his voice. Maybe the glimpse of concern he’d seen in Taehyun’s eyes hadn’t been there after all. Maybe he doesn’t know.

He still hasn’t said anything, just sits there, eyebrows furrowed together in mild confusion, so Kai pulls back, retreats. This calls for a new strategy.

“Nevermind!” he forces out through a nervous laugh. “It doesn’t matter. So what else did you guys do?”

As expected Taehyun doesn’t look too pleased with Kai’s change of course.

“What is it, Kai?” he asks, and he definitely sounds concerned now.

“Just something dumb that happened earlier,” Kai says, shrugging it off. He’d rather not go into details about how he’d broken down over a piece of tissue paper. In fact, he’d rather not go into details about how he’d broken down at all. 

“Really, it doesn’t matter.”

Taehyun doesn’t look entirely convinced.

“Look, something obviously happened, but if you don’t wanna talk about… whatever it is right now, it’s okay.” he says, drawing back as well, a wave pulling back from the shore. But Kai barely has time to celebrate his tiny victory, before the wave crashes right back into the shore and sends Kai running in the other direction like a child playing by the water. 

“You’ve been off for a while. I could hear your voice through the phone earlier. You didn’t sound great.”

“That’s because I’m sick,” Kai says automatically. “I told you.”

“Not not great like that. You know what I mean. You didn’t sound okay. Don’t sound okay, still.”

Kai goes quiet and stares down at the cup of bingsu clasped in his hands. It’s melting.

“You can talk to me, Ning. It’s okay to be upset.” Taehyun says, his voice softening around the edges.

“No.” Kai says, but it comes out as a whisper that’s barely audible. Aware of how unreasonable and silly it sounds, his gaze remains fixed on the bingsu cup.

“Why not?”

It’s not a “that’s so stupid” kind of Why Not, more like a “I just want to understand” kind of Why Not. But Kai isn’t sure how to explain himself. He barely understands what he is feeling.

“I’m not the sunshine boy, I’m _not_.” he blurts out instead. He isn’t sure whether or not he means for it to come out.

“Um, okay?” Taehyun says slowly.

“Like, everyone keeps calling me that, and I just feel...” he trails off. “I feel like a fraud.”

There’s a slight pause.

“Kai, you are not a fraud.” Taehyun says, and it feels like he is underlining every word. 

“You are allowed to be angry or sad, that doesn’t make you any less-”

“I know,” Kai insists, cutting him off. “But like, I don’t want anyone to see that. When I’m not myself.” 

The sun gives life. But come too close and you might get burned.

“I feel like I’m hurting everyone if I do... I don’t want to be a burden to anyone.”

It’s dead quiet for a beat, before Taehyun lets out a quiet sigh, and Kai feels the pressure on the bed ease. He looks up from his bingsu to see Taehyun plopping down on the chair by the desk instead. He lightly pushes the model of the solar system, making the planets spin in a slow orbit around the sun.

“The sun is also a star.” he says bluntly, and Kai resists the urge to snort.

“Isn’t that the name of some Netflix original,” he says drily, or rather, he tries to sound wry but it comes out sounding a bit pathetic, and he has never felt more like a child who’s being consolidated by his parents. 

Taehyun gestures for him to stay quiet and listen, so he does.

“It’s our brightest, biggest star, but if you look outside of our solar system, there’s so much _more_.”

Taehyun gestures to the rest of Kai’s room.

“The entire universe holds _billions_ of stars of all shapes and sizes and colors.” he pauses, seeming to choose his words. “To us, to me and Yeonjun hyung and your parents and everyone else, you’re the sun. You’re _our_ sun. You’ll always be. But sometimes you need someone to be _yours_.” he says.

“You don’t need to try to make us happy, seeing you happy is already enough. But to do that, you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable in front of others. You’re not burdening us by doing that. Of course seeing you hurting hurts the people who care about you too, but then you can talk about it and work it out together. You don’t need to carry the weight of the entire universe on your shoulders.” 

_The sun is also a star._

Kai looks from the miniature sun to Taehyun, who has been with him for as long as he can remember, his presence having become as common to him as looking up and seeing the stars in the sky every night, and knowing they are there even when they aren’t visible. 

And later, when Kai is ready, days from now, weeks, months even, they’ll talk about the gaping hole in their little group of five, they’ll talk about the future that suddenly seems big and scary and unknown, they’ll snicker about Soobin and Yeonjun, and much much more over late night ice cream or visits to the local tteokbokki place, but for now they give Kai’s failed sunflower experiment another go, because that’s what anyone would do with experiments. You try, and if it fails, you make small adjustments and try again.

⭐

“Do you think they’ll grow?”

Taehyun pats soil onto the last seed.

“Sunflowers are pretty tough and enduring. They can grow pretty much anywhere as long as they get lots of sun.”

Kai ignores how Taehyun’s gaze seems to linger on him in that studious way of his.

“The one I tried to grow got plenty of sun though.”

“ _Your_ first attempt failed, because you only planted one.”

That makes sense, actually. He’d made no room for errors.

“Get me some water, will you?”

🌻

“Hello?" Yeonjun sounds a bit scratchy over the phone, but Kai’s face lights up in a bright smile at the sound of his familiar voice regardless.

“Hey Yeonjun hyung, it’s me, Kai,”

“Yeah, I know,” Yeonjun says with a laugh. “What’s up?”

“I just wanted to talk to you,” he says, and it’s the truth. 

“Ah, did you miss me that much?" 

“No I didn’t, shut up Yeonjun,” Not true, but he’s sure Yeonjun knows this.

“That’s _hyung_ for you! Have you been hanging out with Beomgyu lately? Well, don’t. I don’t wanna come back to having two Beomgyu’s running around.”

And something lifts from his chest, or sprouts, and Kai thinks it might be his and Taehyun’s sunflower, the one that is also standing on his windowsill, a few centimeters tall, drinking in the sparse sunlight. It is the only seed to have sprouted out of the nine seeds they’d planted. He wonders how it even survived in the first place. He thinks of Taehyun telling him sunflowers are tough plants. 

The sprout inside of him remains a tiny sapling, but he knows it’ll grow into a flower over time if he takes well care of it. Or tries his best at it, anyways.

“Fine. What have you been up to, _hyung?_ ” he asks while gazing out of his bedroom window.

Across the road, Taehyun is taking out the trash. Kai waves at him but he doesn’t see. He doesn’t mind. He knows he can just cross the street and Taehyun will be right there, and they can go water their sunflower and get bingsu. He decides he will do that as soon as he’s done talking to Yeonjun. For now he rests his chin on his free hand, elbow propped up on the windowsill.

“Hmmm, oh, you’ll never guess who I saw at the grocery shop the other day!” 

“You buy your own groceries?" Kai asks in mild disbelief. "You cook?"

"Ha ha, very funny." Yeonjun says, voice dry as sandpaper. "I can actually make a lot of different dishes now. Just wait till you get to college, you won't survive a day."

"You don't know that! I bet I'm a better cook than you, I just need to learn it first." Kai retorts, and he can almost picture Yeonjun's partly annoyed, partly amused glare. "But who did you meet?" Kai says, steering the conversation back to the original topic.

“I said guess,” 

Kai finds he doesn’t really mind the distance anymore. Yeonjun is Yeonjun, he is confident, extroverted, curious, unafraid and tough and made for the big city life, and Kai doesn’t think that is ever going to change, but he also calls home to his parents every single day, has a Spotify playlist consisting of songs about missing home, and brought back a duck plushie for Kai on his last visit.

His branches may be extending far and wide, weaving quilts with people Kai has never met and might never meet, but Kai knows he will always come back home because that’s where his roots are. 

Kai isn’t worried.

Or, well, maybe a bit worried still, but definitely not as worried as before. It’s a process, as Taehyun has told him; _"You’ll grow and get there eventually."_

Yeonjun talks and talks, and so does Kai, about college and high school and the plant which somehow miraculously has sprouted, but doesn’t have an actual flower yet _(it’ll get there eventually)_ , and like a sunflower, Kai turns his face up towards the yellow circle that hangs above Taehyun’s house and the billions of other stars he can’t see yet but knows are there, and he knows that they are all going to be okay.

🌱

**Author's Note:**

> i am just a sucker for tyunning and little yeonjun/big yeonjun sigh  
> and huening kai just,, deserves everything good in this world bigger sigh  
> also i know the sun is also a star isn't a netflix original, i just thought kai mixing things up would be something he'd do
> 
> thank you so much for reading, i hope you enjoyed! kudos and comments are always much appreciated :)) visit me on my twt or my cc if you want to, i'd love to hear what you thought about it <3
> 
> [twt](https://twitter.com/hyukaang) // [cc](https://curiouscat.qa/yeonbun)


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